Teespring

As I went back to study up on marketing Teespring and Teechip T-shirts to help me reach my goal of making $10,000 in my spare time, I realized that one way to better your chances of success with T-shirts is to have a large and active Facebook fan page on a topic. This will allow you to post different T-shirt designs to it on a regular basis. This makes even more sense if you are going to primarily do your advertising for the T-shirts through Facebook ads.

When you put together a Facebook ad, you have to choose a Facebook page to sponsor the ad. This means if you don’t have one which accurately reflects the T-shirt design you want to promote, you have to create a new one. When I created the gluten free T-shirt, I didn’t have a page that fit well, so I created a Gluten Free Families Facebook page. When I made the Hello Knitty T-shirt, I created a Hello Kitty Fanatics Facebook page.

As part of the Facebook ads, there is a button on the advertisement to “like” the page sponsoring the ad in the top right corner:

While the gluten free page only received a few likes, the Hello Kitty page received 19 likes. My guess, and what I am hoping to show during this challenge, is that in addition to selling T-shirts, you can also begin to build communities where you can sell other T-shirts down the line. This process will likely take more time than I have for this challenge, but for those who are selling, this is a good to keep in mind. If you find a T-shirt design which sells, there’s a good chance you will have the opportunity to build a thriving Facebook page without spending any money to do it, since the T-shirt sales are covering the costs. On the other side of the coin, even if your T-shirt fails, you still will gain a small benefit for the money you spent by helping to build the fan page.

I think this would actually have been the best way to begin with T-shirts. As the Hello Knitty campaign showed, pitching to a community which already has a high interest in the topic makes it a lot easier to sell. If you create the pages about themes you’re already interested in, they should be easy and enjoyable to maintain while creating a community you can sell to down the road.

One of the things that I have started doing is filling in the new pages I create with some content so they don’t look like they were just created. An convenient tool to do this with is called Instapost (use access code “teespy” to get it for free). This quickly pulls up a popular image on whatever topic you input so you don’t have to spend a lot of time researching. If you want three or four great images, just hit the “generate post” button a few times. This will make the new fan page look more active to attract even more people to like it.

After failing to sell a single T-shirt with my fist two designs (gluten free and paddleboarders) as part of my quest to earn $10,000 in my spare time challenge, I decided to change things up a bit. I have access to a facebook page with about 22,000 likes, and I had an idea I thought might resonate with the target audience. More than anything else, I wanted to know if my ideas were the issue for no sales with the previous T-shirts, or if it was my lack of Facebook marketing skills. I figured making a T-shirt design targeted at this group would give me an answer to that question.

The Facebook page was mainly frequented by Hello Kitty fans, and my idea was a parody. The parody was a Hello Kitty and Knitting combination mashup to create “Hello Knitty.” I felt this would appeal to Hello Kitty fans who loved to knit, and while not a huge group, they would likely be passionate about both. I sent this idea to Michael (@MindLightMedia) who I think did a wonderful job with the design:

I placed the design on Teechip, and it hit the right chord with a few of the fans. There were 8 T-shirts sold in the first two days, and I thought I was onto something. Knowing there were people out there who liked the design enough to purchase it, I set my sites on spending money on Facebook ads to get more sales. Since I never reached my $10 ad buy limit with the first two T-shirts, I decided no matter what I would spend at least $10 on this one. I ended up spending just over $13.00 on ads, but unfortunately, my marketing through Facebook didn’t yield any additional sales.

The lesson from this has been it’s my marketing which is the current problem in obtaining sales, not the ideas. It’s quite disappointing, and I know it’s time for me to go back to do more research on marketing so I can see if I can find where I’m going wrong. In the end, the campaign closed with 8 sales for a profit of $74.31 (77.31 – $3 = $74.31 — The $3 is $1 per shirt after 5 shirts that went to Michael, the designer)

That means after my first three T-shirt campaigns, I’m barely out of the red. While that’s better than being in the red, I will still have to make some major improvements if I am going to end up meeting the $10,000 goal.

At the same time I came out with the Gluten Free T-shirt idea as part of my attempt to earn $10,000 in my spare time using the T-shirt platforms Teechip and Teespring, I also came up with a T-shirt for stand up paddleboarders. I’m not sure exactly how I got to paddleboarding (I was searching all kinds of ideas and made my way to surfing, which eventually led me to paddleboarding), but I ended up seeing the quote, “Paddleboarders are stand up people.”

I decided to make it gender specific with the idea if it work with men, I could easily create another one specifically for women. I had Joseph M (another graphic design artists I hired off of Craigslist – his site and Facebook page) create the following “I’m a stand up type of a guy” T-shirt:

After uploading the design to Teechip, I again had high hopes the T-shirt would do well. I placed an ad up on Facebook with a $10.00 budget with the hope I could get my first sale(s). Once again, I was disappointed. These are the stats I saw in the morning:

The click through rate was far too low (under 1%) and the cost per click far too high ($0.48) for me to feel this would be a success. I stopped the campaign after only spending $1.90. I probably should have let it go a bit longer, but those stats were so much lower than the gluten free T-shirt stats, which I also stopped, that I couldn’t justify continuing it.

One main failure with this campaign was choosing a topic which I wasn’t extremely knowledgeable about. I’ve been paddleboarding before, but only a few times. I think taking chances on new areas like this makes sense, but it makes sense when I have a better marketing foundation with which to promote it. What I really should have done is spent some time talking to some friends who paddleboard a lot more than I do to get their opinion of what would have made a good T-shirt. Again, this isn’t to say this wouldn’t have worked, I think I simply jumped the gun in picking a topic I wasn’t as familiar with as I should have been.

What I did learn from the first two campaigns is I’m paying too much for each click with Facebook ads at the moment. I need to figure out a way to decrease this amount. I would ideally like to get clicks to a maximum of $0.10 a click, and preferably much lower. I think this will be the sweet spot to get 2 or more T-shirt sales for $10.

The failure to make any sales on my second attempt puts me further into the negative.

As part of my earning $10,000 spare time challenge using Teechip and Teespring T-shirt generation platforms, I placed my first T-shirt design up with moderate hopes it would do well. I knew coming in that the vast majority of T-shirt designs fail, but the idea I had in mind met all the criteria I wanted for a T-shirt design to make a successful launch. This is how the first attempt at making money with T-shirts went.

The process for choosing the design was pretty simple. I thought about groups who in my experience seemed pretty passionate about their topic of interest. I then looked up quotes and sayings on those particular topics. If I saw a quote or saying I liked, I did a Google search to see if there were already T-shirts out there with that saying on them. If not, I looked at other at the general offerings of T-shirts on that topic. I had done this on several subjects when I searched “gluten free.” I know from writing articles on this site those eating gluten free could be passionate, and while there were a lot of T-shirts which said things like “100% Gluten Free” and “Gluten Free Makes Me Happy,” I didn’t think these got to the core of why people go gluten free, and wondered if I could create something a bit more specific and personal.

I remembered overhearing a gluten free friend’s response when someone asked her how she could eat food that didn’t taste all that great. She replied that eating gluten free made her body feel better than any food could ever taste. I thought this might make a perfect T-shirt.

I sent the idea to one of the graphic design artists I hired off of Craigslist (Michael from @MindLightMedia), and he came back with the following design:

I uploaded it to Teechip, and I thought it looked pretty good on a number of differnet colored T-shirts. After seeing the design on the T-shirt, I was hopeful I could sell at least a few.

I went into Facebook ad manager and created a simple ad. I decided my budget for these attempts will be $10, and hopefully within that time period I’ll be able to make at least a couple of sales. If I can’t, then in most cases it won’t we worthwhile keeping the ad running. I checked how the campaign was going and found the following stats:

The stats were quite disappointing. The click through rate was less than 5% (4.299%), and my guess is it would need to be closer to 10% for the T-shirt to have a chance to make a profit. The cost of the reach was also quite expensive. The reach (435) was costing me $0.25 a click. The reach really needed to be 3 to 4 times that for what I was paying to give me a chance to sell some T-shirts and make a profit. I ended the ad buy.

While disappointing, it wasn’t all bad. The page with the shirt received 119 facebook likes, so the message resonated at least to some degree. It just wasn’t enough to get the people who saw it to pull the trigger and purchase it.

My guess is my main failure was the target audience was too broad. I’ll have to see if I can narrow it down a bit and possibly give this T-shirt a try again when I feel a bit more confident with my targeting.

One thing I’m quickly learning is that selling T-shirts has a much larger learning curve than I ever imagined. My impression was I would simply come up with some ideas, see if they hit the right note, and if I could find enough which did, I would be able to succeed at the $10,000 in my spare time challenge. I’m quickly finding this isn’t going to be the case.

I spent about 5 hours after work the last two evenings just trying to figure out stuff I assumed a 5 year old could do. Apparently my skill level is well below that of child when it comes to this. My brain was hurting from information overload, but I’ve reached the point where I’ve absorbed enough information that I think I can start testing. The reality is I’m probably at the point where I’m actually dangerous. That is, I think I actually know what I’m doing without having actually done anything to prove I know something. Either way, it’s time to start testing the waters with actual T-shirt designs, do some trials and see if I can get some campaigns to actually work.

What I’ve taken away from the last couple of days of cram courses are three main points I’ll try to incorporate into my campaigns. Since I haven’t actually started, I’m not 100% sure these are correct, but it’s a good starting point, and I can make adjustments as I gain actual campaign experience.

Look for Passions

People aren’t going to buy a T-shirt unless they are passionate about what the T-shirt conveys. The more passionate the topic, the better chance I have of selling to them. Most people are passionate about something, and finding what that is, then creating a T-shirt which expresses that passion is one of my primary goals.

Make it Personal

People like to wear T-shirts that represent who they are. Finding a way to make designs personal so the person looks at it says, “this is me” I think will greatly improve my chance of selling the design. Some of the most successful T-shirt designs target who people think they are (Grandpa, Grandma, nurse, firefighter, soldier, etc.) The first big hit for the college student who made over $80,000 in a year was high school seniors, something all kids who are in the last year of high school proudly identify themselves as.

Targeting is Essential

One thing that is clear is targeting the correct audience is essential to the success of any T-shirt design. If the audience is too general, the advertising budget will be wasted on people who don’t have the passion needed to purchase the T-shirt. The same is true if the T-shirt design doesn’t resonate with those you put it in front of. For these reasons, it’s important for me to know my audience and have a plan to target them.

Remember when I wrote I would start by listing on Teechip, but anyone doing this would still need a Teespring account? The reason for this is audience targeting. One of the things I learned which I think will be extremely beneficial is you can use Facebook ads to find an audience, but when you use the Facebook ad tool, if you place in two topics, the search is a “this or that” search. That is if I want to target an audience of teachers who like ballet, a search on Facebook of those two topics would send ads to teachers OR to those who like ballet, not teachers who also like ballet. To do that, you need to download a tool.

The tool is called Audience Intersect and can only be used with the Google’s Chrome browser. This tool is sponsored by Teespring, so in order to download it, you need a Teespring account. The good news is you can use it to target audiences no matter which T-shirt company you use. Downloading this and installing it will give you a button in your Facebook ad area which will allow you to combine interests, so the ads you purchase can be targeted toward exactly who you want to see them.

With this information in mind, I will begin launching some campaigns, while explaining the reasoning behind how I came to decide on that specific design. I’m not expecting a whole lot from these first campaigns, but I hope they teach me some good lessons that I can use to continually refine the campaigns I launch.

One thing I’m quickly learning is that selling T-shirts has a much larger learning curve than I ever imagined. My impression was I would simply come up with some ideas, see if they hit the right note, and if I could find enough which did, I would be able to succeed at the $10,000 in my spare time challenge. I’m quickly finding this isn’t going to be the case.

I spent about 5 hours after work the last two evenings just trying to figure out stuff I assumed a 5 year old could do. Apparently my skill level is well below that of child when it comes to this. My brain was hurting from information overload, but I’ve reached the point where I’ve absorbed enough information that I think I can start testing. The reality is I’m probably at the point where I’m actually dangerous. That is, I think I actually know what I’m doing without having actually done anything to prove I know something. Either way, it’s time to start testing the waters with actual T-shirt designs, do some trials and see if I can get some campaigns to actually work.

What I’ve taken away from the last couple of days of cram courses are three main points I’ll try to incorporate into my campaigns. Since I haven’t actually started, I’m not 100% sure these are correct, but it’s a good starting point, and I can make adjustments as I gain actual campaign experience.

Look for Passions

People aren’t going to buy a T-shirt unless they are passionate about what the T-shirt conveys. The more passionate the topic, the better chance I have of selling to them. Most people are passionate about something, and finding what that is, then creating a T-shirt which expresses that passion is one of my primary goals.

Make it Personal

People like to wear T-shirts that represent who they are. Finding a way to make designs personal so the person looks at it says, “this is me” I think will greatly improve my chance of selling the design. Some of the most successful T-shirt designs target who people think they are (Grandpa, Grandma, nurse, firefighter, soldier, etc.) The first big hit for the college student who made over $80,000 in a year was high school seniors, something all kids who are in the last year of high school proudly identify themselves as.

Targeting is Essential

One thing that is clear is targeting the correct audience is essential to the success of any T-shirt design. If the audience is too general, the advertising budget will be wasted on people who don’t have the passion needed to purchase the T-shirt. The same is true if the T-shirt design doesn’t resonate with those you put it in front of. For these reasons, it’s important for me to know my audience and have a plan to target them.

Remember when I wrote I would start by listing on Teechip, but anyone doing this would still need a Teespring account? The reason for this is audience targeting. One of the things I learned which I think will be extremely beneficial is you can use Facebook ads to find an audience, but when you use the Facebook ad tool, if you place in two topics, the search is a “this or that” search. That is if I want to target an audience of teachers who like ballet, a search on Facebook of those two topics would send ads to teachers OR to those who like ballet, not teachers who also like ballet. To do that, you need to download a tool.

The tool is called Audience Intersect and can only be used with the Google’s Chrome browser. This tool is sponsored by Teespring, so in order to download it, you need a Teespring account. The good news is you can use it to target audiences no matter which T-shirt company you use. Downloading this and installing it will give you a button in your Facebook ad area which will allow you to combine interests, so the ads you purchase can be targeted toward exactly who you want to see them.

With this information in mind, I will begin launching some campaigns, while explaining the reasoning behind how I came to decide on that specific design. I’m not expecting a whole lot from these first campaigns, but I hope they teach me some good lessons that I can use to continually refine the campaigns I launch.